I seem to have opened a can of worms with this question. All I realy wanted to know was if there was an easier way other than PACK to keep my databases 'tidy' and not have them scattered all over the HD. As the program in question moves and delete records invisibly to the user, at the end of a work day there may be 50 or more deleted records. When originaly designed it was supposed to be a single user app, so issuing a pack on the data enviroment destroy event worked well. But, as usaul, the users changed their minds and it became a multi user app. This made simple 'housekeeping' more difficult. At this point in time, changing the code to recycle deleted records is not practical, the app is in production and schedualed to go national as soon as I fix the last couple of bugs(I'm doing way better than W2K, they have 34992 more bugs than me). Sadly, this app is the last app we will build with VFP. So far I have managed to convince my boss that it is not worth moving it to Oracle, where this problem would be irrelavent.At this time it seems that I will have to have a user do the cleanup regularily. I built a quick prg to do it and added it to a menu. Of course, it does require a user to do something, which is not something that can be depended on.